


a bucket of ashes

by ideare



Category: Blood Drive (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Magical Realism, Non-Linear Narrative, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 15:10:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ideare/pseuds/ideare
Summary: The middle might vary, but the end is always the same.





	a bucket of ashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



> The past is a bucket of ashes.  
>  — Carl Sandburg

 

Lights pulse out of the Scar, flaring upwards to illuminate the darkening sky. It's hypnotic.

Aki's head is tilted back, watching her own personal Aurora Australis. Her legs dangle over the edge of the Scar, the tips of her shoes swallowed up by the swell of shadows that constantly threaten to spill out of the infinite cavern.

It feels weird to be back here — to be back where it all started.

::

The room is full of photographs. They clutter the desk, the walls, and the very top of Aki's closet, gathering ghosts and dust. If the photographs on the floor weren't bundled into haphazard piles every few steps, there would be no space to walk.

For the most part, Aki has no idea who are in these photos. There are pictures of people long gone that she never even knew, and pictures of people yet to be born that she will never meet.

A photograph of herself catches her eye. Aki reaches down and works it free of its pile. Her fingerprints leave whorls of clarity on the image. She swipes the side of her finger along the photograph's surface, bunching up the dust into long rolls of grey that flutter to the ground once pushed over the edge. 

In the photograph: Aki faces the camera head-on, a neutral expression on her face. She is holding a small, black cat up against her cheek. Her short hair is in a half-ponytail, the tips of which brush against the fur of the cat.

Aki languidly traces a Remember sigil over the photograph. She watches as the purple light of the sigil flares blinding bright for a few seconds before dulling down and sinking into the photograph. Her finger traces the matte green of the shrubbery behind her time-locked counterpart: She is back in the garden, feeling the soft fur of her cat, the heat of it's body is a blooming warmth against her cheek.

Smiling, Aki lets the photograph flutter to the ground.

::

Christopher is curled up on the ground with his eyes squeezed shut. The gritty surface of the road leaves imprints and tiny rocks on his forehead, but he doesn't feel how they grind into his skin. His attention is on his stomach, and the white glare of continuous pain that threads through him. 

He crosses his arms against his stomach, his hands scrabbling for his sides, his fingers gripping and releasing small handfuls of flesh. He does this in a vain attempt to distract himself from the scrunching pressure of what feels like his stomach collapsing in on itself. Little moans sputter out of his mouth like a stalling engine. 

This shouldn't be happening. None of this should be happening.

::

"What do you think it's like, beyond the Scar?" 

Christopher sends a nod across the jagged crack that splits North America into East and West — a nation truly divided. He asks this question as if it even matters, as if there is any point in imagining what the rest of the world is like now. He asks this question as if there is a hope in Hell of actually making it across the Scar.

Sometimes, Christopher catches himself thinking about the Scar, (even when he's not sitting in a convertible,eating ice-cream a few feet away from it.) He thinks about how big the Scar actually is: if he super-imposed a map of the world over it — one that was to-scale — how far would it go? Does the Scar traverse the entire globe, effectively dividing the world into an 'Us and Them'? He thinks about how much power the Scar actually possesses, and how much people attribute to it out of fear and a lack of a more plausible explanation. Did the Scar really rip the fabric of their reality, rendering everything they know about the world useless?

Tilting his arm a bit, Christopher flicks his tongue out to lick away the melting ice-cream, running sticky and cool down his wrist. He barely hears Aki's response:

"It's _like_ it was always supposed to be. It's like we're back on track."

Aki scans the horizon. She sees the sky gradating through several shades of blue in Greece, the stars twinkling, undisturbed. She sees the sun, red and too large, solidifying out of the ocean in Hawaii, ready to illuminate a new day.

Since the Scar opened up, belching forth a new reality and crumbling civilization around it like washed tissue in old jeans, there has been a drastic decrease in the world's pollution. Even the Californian Territories — formerly so blanketed in smog that the top of the cityscape was often reduced to smudged and blurry outlines — now has a view straight out of a Disney animation. Eyvind Earle would be proud.

::

Before the panic can fully settle in, before it can trigger fear and Aki's 'fight or flight' mode, a sense of calm washes over her. It's the same feeling she gets after waking up with her head on Christopher's chest from a two-hour nap at 3:50PM on a Wednesday afternoon; it's peace.

Aki steps out from behind her pillar, turning in a half-circle with the fluidity and grace of a ballerina. Her eyes take in the gentle slope of the New Fusion, the nuclear powered car that can go for a million miles on a single charge. Only twelve of these cars exist, so naturally, Heart Enterprises owns more than half of them. 

Aki and Christopher have done the maths, and the New Fusion is currently the easiest car to maintain on the road — what, with them not needing to lure and feed people into their engines. Which is convenient, because human resources were scarce now that the majority of the population of the Californian Territories were underground in fracking tubes, fuelling the various buildings owned by Heart Enterprises.

A smile blossoms on Aki's face when she sees Christopher. She makes her way over to him with the same swaying, purposeful stride that is by now irreversibly stamped into her being.

Christopher gets out of the idling car, greeting Aki with a matching grin. He may be mostly machine now, but he doesn't have to fake or mimic the emotions he feels for Aki. By now, this smile is a natural, almost Pavlovian response to her presence.

He swoops her up into a hug as soon as they're together, momentarily forgetting about his new mods. By the time he _does_ remember, Aki is already squeezing him back with an inhuman strength he hadn't realised she still had. His smile grows even bigger at that.

Several beats longer than they can really spare, they release each other.

"Come on," Christopher walks around to open the passenger door, "let's get out of here." 

As Aki gets into the car, Christopher scans the area furtively. His guilt puts him on high alert; they could have just as easily greeted each other _inside_ the car, rather than _outside_ of it. Especially when taking into account that they had last seen each other mere hours ago. True, it had felt like hours, and with Heart Enterprises as an enemy, there is no guarantee of a 'next time' for moments to happen in. 

Back in the driver's seat, with the doors clicking locked around them, Christopher leans over the gear stick, meeting Aki halfway for a quick kiss. Before they go back into their respective spaces, they smile at each other like they have all the time in the world, like they're not on the run for their lives.

But, safety is relative, and with the locked doors of a bulletproof car between them and the rest of the world, Christopher feels pretty safe. (And he has to admit: he feels practically invincible with Aki at his side, and his new mods adapting to his biology.)

::

"I think I'm dying," Christopher gargles. He tries to move, to shift into a more comfortable position, but the pain knocks him down again.

Aki stretches her hand out, reaching for Christopher's back, not daring to pull him closer to her. Her fingertips rub a gentle, but firm track down the knobs of Christopher's spine. They're harder now, with more protrusions, composed of a mix of metal and bones. It's strange — surreal, almost — to feel this on someone else. Aki silently curses the upgrades, the whole of Heart Enterprises. She wishes she had been strong enough to stop all this before it escalated to their current situation. She wishes she could have gotten them safely away from the manipulation of Heart Enterprises the first time they had tried to escape. But wishes, like worrying, only occupies her mind without actually helping her situation. So, now they're here, with Christopher suffering, thinking that he's about to die, and all because of... because of —

" _Heart_." 

She hisses that part out, low and dangerous. She hisses that part out like a curse, as if it's synonymous for _Karma_.

Her fingers dig unintentionally deeper into Christopher's back, causing a shock of pain to shoot through his spine. He gives a short cry of agony.

"You're not dying," she says, louder this time. "Your body is rejecting the mods; you're turning human again."

::

There are two pictures (12-inches by 8-inches) stuck to the Westward-facing windows of the room. Both are originally monochrome, painted over in too bright, saturated colours. On the left, the photograph is: Aki and Christopher, smiling fondly at each other in a yellow convertible as they zoom away from a faded green sign that says "California: 350 miles". On the right, the photograph is: Aki, with ash on her face and a liquid rainbow of tears smeared down her cheeks, cradling the limp and impaled body of Christopher in the centre of the rubble of Heart Enterprises.

Whichever photo Aki's eyes land on will be the outcome.

Her eyes are constantly pulled to the one on the right.

A sudden, but steady rain drums against the window pane. The colours of the photo on the left bleed into each other, erasing Aki's freedom, erasing Christopher's hope.

::

Christopher is hoping to see the static that emits from the Scar. He adjusts and re-adjusts the setting on his new eyes, trying to see through the light pollution of the day-time. The attempt leaves him slightly nauseous, dizzy, with a frequency chart superimposed over empty air the only thing to show for his efforts.

He blinks, rubs the sand out of his eyes, blinks again. He'll get used to this — used to the way that the world both expands and minimises, complicates and simplifies with all his new senses. He'll get used to this — he'll have to.

::

Aki smiles at the faint twinkle of stars, at the clouds darkened by nightfall as they swirl across the sky in cahoots with the brisk wind, threatening a storm. The wind swirls around her, tickling her hair across her face, her eyes obscured by the strands. 

This is the first time that Aki has been outside. This Aki anyway. Officer Aki had been outside multiple times; she was a cop, it had been her job. And Aki knows about the Aki in HR, the one who has more power than her title would suggest, the one who practically ran Heart Enterprises if anyone asked. But for all the Aki units that have been made, Aki is sure that she is the first to be outside as a human. The first to have the memories of their original life trickling back.

She takes a deep breath, not out of necessity, but desire. She hears the soft whirring of her gears as she feels her lungs expanding, the synthetic material pressing against her metal ribs. She can feel the steady strum of what passes for her blood as it flows through her veins: a colourful highway with no real beginning and no real end.

It's still an interesting feeling: breathing. She'll no doubt get the hand of it though, like the other Aki units who had to blend into society by mimicking not only their emotions, but their actions, too.

Aki looks over as the soft click of the exit she had taken hiccups into the silence of the dying city. The locks re-engage and the door melts back into the obscurity of a brick wall. Without her mechanical eyes, without her direct connection to the Heart Enterprise mainframe, Aki can't see where the exit would've been. She knows though, that with the technology that Heart Enterprises owns, and the innovative technology that they have funded into creation, the exit no longer exists (technically) in this reality.

 

Aki doesn't move, even when her attention is pulled away from entryways and liminal spaces when she hears a car approaching.

::

They always end up back here: back at the edge of the Scar — the place where they are born again.

Aki doesn't recall too much of her human life; she doesn't remember her mother, but the Scar cradles her like she's the main character in a nursery rhyme and the world is just waiting for her to fall. Sometimes, she doesn't give time or the world a chance, and flings herself head-first back into the loop that is her life.

::

Christopher can hear his new joints clicking as he rotates his neck. The worst of the pain is almost over, but it still feels like his insides are liquefying.

This close to the Scar, he can hear his name on the wind. Each gust is an exhale of his full name, a tempting lure to blissful oblivion. He is almost tempted to respond, but he can't see who is calling him. (Old memories rush back to him of his mother warning him about answering to voiceless calls of his name; the past smashes down, concrete and head-rushingly fast against the vague, tantalising promises of the present.)

::

The alarm is a muffled, but incessant shrill somewhere in the next room. Its vibration sounding loud and external in the silence of the building. Christopher blinks awake, staring tiredly at the ancient water-stain on his ceiling.

He doesn't want to get up yet. He wants to lie here as his eyes adjust to the brightness of his curtain-less bedroom, as his body psychs itself up for another day of gruelling teeth-gathering.

He tries to think of a reward he could acquire if he gets up now, right this second — gets up, gets washed, gets dressed — and comes up blank. So he shuffles around in the bed, shifts over so that he's lying on his side: one arm tucked under his pillow, propping up his head slightly, the other hand warming in the snug nook between his knees.

He is just on the verge of falling back asleep when he remembers: a flash of turquoise eyes, a confident smirk from a freckled face, a shiny new badge with 'AKI' stamped dead-centre — the new officer. He grins sleepily and sits up.

::

They could've met at a bar instead of on the force and the ending would play out the same way. Like the time they were sport coaches for a university, and that drunk driver collided with their bus as they were coming back from an away game. Or the time they met at a train station, not realising that they were already dead. 

The middle might vary, but the end is always the same.

::

Aki lies down next to Christopher, curling her body around him like the closing of a parentheses. Her head is on his chest, her ears straining to hear the weak flow of his blood as it passes through the centrifugal pumps.

She's saying his name like a mantra, like a single-worded prayer, like a spell that would bring him back.

Her face is hot and wet from her anguish. There are times when she goes still, stays silent, confusing her own body heat for Christopher's. When she realises, she threads her spell into the silence of the space around them, weaving hope and a future like a seamstress.

A series of pops sound off in the distance, getting louder as they rush inwards towards them, towards the central pillar of the main headquarters of Heart Enterprises. Aki's whole world is literally about to crumble around her, but she doesn't have the energy to fight it off, not any more.


End file.
